Why a game show beats a team-building exercise
The problem with most corporate entertainment is that it asks people who work
together to perform in front of each other. A game show does the opposite: it
gives everyone something external to shout at. The quiet people on your team
turn out to know an unreasonable amount about 90s television, and the room finds
that out together.
That is the whole mechanism. Nobody has to be funny, nobody has to share
something personal, and nobody has to do a trust fall. They just have to know
whether that was Fleetwood Mac.
Choosing a format for your group
- Under 30 people — a hosted "Game Show" trivia night works
well, because teams stay small enough that everyone on a team actually gets
to answer something.
- 30 to 100 — this is the sweet spot for buzzers and a big
screen. Teams of six to eight, a proper leaderboard, and enough of a crowd
that the between-round banter lands.
- Over 100 — music bingo scales better than trivia. Everyone
has a card, everyone is engaged on every single song, and you are not waiting
on twenty teams to hand in answer sheets.
Custom categories are the part people remember
Any trivia host can ask general knowledge questions. The rounds that actually
land at a company event are the ones about the company: how many people have
been here more than five years, which office has the most coffee consumption,
whose LinkedIn photo is that. We build those in alongside the standard
categories — music, sports, TV and entertainment, numbers, and the rest.
Send us the material a week or so out and it goes into the show. It is the
single cheapest thing you can do to make a hired event feel like it was made for
your team, because it was.
Hire a host, or run it yourself
Two ways to do this, and the right answer depends on what you are short of.
Hire our hosts if you are short of time or nerve. They have
performed at hundreds of events — corporate staff Christmas parties, birthdays,
team-building days, weekly bar and restaurant trivia nights — and they arrive
with the audio and visual gear, run the sound check, handle the music, and take
the pressure of running the room off whoever on your team would otherwise be
holding the microphone.
Download a game and host it yourself if you are short of
budget, or if you have someone internally who genuinely wants the job. The
presentation packs from our trivia store are built to be run by someone who has
never hosted before: the questions, the answers, the scoring and the running
order are all in the file. You supply a screen and a volunteer.
Planning notes
A hosted show needs about two hours of room time for the game itself, plus
setup beforehand. Book the room for longer than the show — the half hour after
the final scores is where the actual mingling happens, and cutting it short is
the most common mistake we see.
If your event has speeches, tell us in advance. It is much better to build the
show around them than to stop a game show halfway through so someone can thank
the finance team.
Tell us your group size, your date, and roughly who is in the room, and we
will tell you honestly which format fits — including when the answer is
"download a game and save your money."
